


Good Soldiers

by Sildae



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 04:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sildae/pseuds/Sildae
Summary: Order 66 isn’t the end.





	Good Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skywalking-across-the-galaxy (BadWolfGirl01)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolfGirl01/gifts).



Grievous was dead, but Utapau raged.

A drop pilot had witnessed Kenobi’s victory and relayed it accordingly. Cody couldn’t muster much more than grim satisfaction; the sunken city was wreathed in blaster fire and dust, the sky above crossed with drop ships and smoke plumes. Even without their supreme commander, the droids showed no sign of relenting—and as always, they had the numbers.

According to Kenobi, the war was almost over.

“ _These are our last battles, Commander,_ ” his general had said, in the half light of _Vanguard_ ’s launch bay three days ago, one foot propped on the wing of his interceptor. He hadn’t smiled, but his eyes had been bright with some sort of inner amusement. " _Perhaps it is time you planned for life beyond the armies of the Republic.”_

_“I have my duty, sir,_ ” Cody had said, unable to answer humor with humor, but still letting a wry smile twist. “ _I make a good soldier.”_

Kenobi had only replied with an arch of his blond brow. And then he was gone, the interceptor lifting away from the bay and through the blue haze to the stars beyond.

Three days.

In three days, everything Cody had known about the war, the Jedi—himself, his brothers—had shattered.

Sweat pooled at the back of his neck. A tiny fan whirred in vain; Utapau was arid, but it wasn’t hot. His scalp itched, and in one place, stung from the salt and dust.

_Be ready,_  Rex had said.

As if summoned by that thought, Kenobi’s beast slid into Cody’s HUD peripherals. “Commander,” Kenobi called, as Cody turned. “Contact your troops. Tell them to move to the higher levels.”

“Very good, sir.” But a weight at his side stopped Cody from opening comms. _Of all the times for him to lose his bloody glowstick._  “Oh, by the way, I think you’ll be needing this.”

“Thank you, Cody.” Ever unruffled, his general slid the lightsaber to his waist. “Now let’s get a move on, we’ve got a battle to win here.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

"Commander Cody,” a blue shadow began, his words slow, heavy, careful. Living things that slipped, cold and wet, through his mind. The side of his head itched, stung.

He’d expected more time.

He’d expected it to be...what?

_Not_ in the middle of battle? Not in the chaos and dust and smoke? Not with the scream of metal sheering and the cries of his own brothers, the hundreds and hundreds of eyes, watching, waiting?

No. It was strategic perfection.

“Yes, my lord.”

* * *

A day ago, Cody had met with his most trusted officers. They’d stood silent as he’d sketched the bones of their existence, their purpose. Their _new_ duty.

Their new war.

They’d believed him even before he had palmed the tiny chip from its hidden case, carefully attached beneath his desk. Of course they had. Those six had been with him since Geonosis. They’d had the nightmares, too.

On the lowest level of Pau City, as the dust rose around him in a reddish haze, Cody licked his dry lips and triggered an all-open comm. This would change everything. The city would burn. Maybe they would all burn with it.

Cody closed his eyes.

“Hold defensive positions,” he said. He breathed in once, then out. _Good soldiers follow orders._ “New objective. Order 66.”

He knew six visors would swing in his direction. Cody opened his eyes, aimed his focus at Boil, who sat at the ready on a proton cannon.

“Blast him.”

* * *

He’d _had_ to survived. This was _Obi-Wan._ He’d survived far more than a high dive and a measly search droid. “Did you find Kenobi?”

Wooley, his ARC kit smudged with blood and grit, moved his bucket only an inch to one side. The tension in Cody’s gut uncoiled. “Sir, no one could have survived that fall.”

Wooley was the 212th’s only assigned ARC at the moment. That HUD would’ve caught everything he needed to know. In Cody’s office a day before, Wooley had sat in silence, the bacta unit still attached to his temple as he had sliced with single-minded intensity into his bucket’s guts.

_He had to survive._

But Cody had his own duty. They had to abandon the city, droids or no droids. It _would_ burn. He couldn’t stop it.

But it would give Kenobi the needed window to escape.

“Start loading your men on the ship. Move it!”

* * *

It wasn’t just Pau City that burned, in the end. The Temple had glowed in the Coruscant night—a beacon of victory, of defeat. Something hard as durasteel had wrapped around Cody’s lungs at that debriefing, the holofootage bright with the flash of lightsabers and blaster fire, white armor and small bodies.

Maybe the galaxy should’ve burned, too.

But the glow on the horizon remained steady and the heavens did not light up with fire while GARHQ—now _Imperial_ HQ—heaved with the mass of recalled troopers. Orders had been issued for a full reorganization of the former Army of the Grand Republic, and Cody had stood at rigid attention with his brothers in front of the new expanse of admiralty. Tarkin, resplendent in his new dress whites, had walked the long line of clone captains and commanders, his sonorous voice aimed somewhere above their heads, no doubt ensuring Cody and his brothers knew their place.

The empire had risen from the ashes of their war, Tarkin had assured them, and would be brought forth into this new era by their own steady hands. They would bring order. Peace. Perfection.

Cody breathed in the stench of oil and human sweat and forced his jaw to relax.

_Good soldiers follow orders._

He had a duty to perform.

* * *

Three years after he’d watched Obi-Wan fall, Cody had his first true lead.

It had been almost impossible to leave the watchful eye of the new empire, especially in his sole role as teaching sergeant on Coruscant. With a state army hungry to be fed new recruits, he’d been filed into that training role without so much as a by-your-leave.

He didn’t dare question why. Or think beyond the carefully sterile landscape of Coruscant’s facilities—but lessons were best taught in the field, he argued, only once, three years after that fall.

And quickly learned he was being watched.

* * *

“Took you long enough,” the gruff creature to his right muttered.

Cody hunched over the dregs of his Toydarian whiskey and didn’t reply. This particular bar on Selek V was as bland a box as he’d ever seen, the music just loud enough to drown out conversations three feet away and lights dim enough to make everything at the edges a vague shadow.

“‘Ey bartender,” the man said, louder, swinging a hand to get the broad Besalisk’s attention. “Another round for our empire’s mightiest.”

Cody ignored the dry twist to the man’s voice. When the Besalisk set another whiskey in front of Cody, the man reached over, plucked it from the bar, and drained half.

Without another word, the man—who Cody knew shared his own face beneath the mat of hair—slid off his stool and toward the exit.

When Cody picked up the tumbler, his fingers found a datachip carefully planted on its underside.

* * *

Six years after, Cody grasped freedom.

It was abrupt, painful, and deadly for the team he’d been tasked with. The Outer Regions had none of the surveillance of the Inner Rim, and the ambush was real—but his death was not.

Even free, he had his place—there were others, after all. And their war hadn’t really ended. Other datachips has been slipped to him in the years following that first bar on Selek V.

Always good soldiers, his free brothers had been busy.

But first, he had to know.

* * *

“You made it.”

Tatooine breathed with a heat that choked his lungs and made his vision swim, but Cody hadn’t dared dream up the form in front of him. Not in nine years.

“I did.”

Cody might’ve stayed on that sandy path through the rocks, staring in shock for another almost-decade, if Kenobi hadn’t steered him to what seemed to be his home, austere but thickly built, its interior a sharp difference from the intensity of the heat outside.

“Sir, I—“

“I am just Obi-Wan, now, Cody. Or rather, Ben, if you please.”

Cody swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. There was so much to say. And no words seemed adequate.

But his Jedi didn’t need him to speak. Again that once-familiar amusement lit Obi-Wan’s eyes. “I believe a measure of thanks are in order.”

“Who found you first?”

“I had been in contact with Senator Organa from the fall of the Republic, but never in any great capacity,” Obi-Wan said, pulling a bag from his shoulders and tucking various items into the shelves that lined one corner of the room. “But of course Ahsoka found me not long after, though I believe it was through the Senator, as well. And I’m sure you’re now part of their network.”

He was. But Rex had understood, placing a staying hand on Ahsoka's shoulder when she would have pressed Cody's first assignment. 

Seven days later, Cody had caught sight of Kenobi—by sheer dumb luck—within Anchorhead, passing among the market stalls as if he didn’t have the highest bounty of the galaxy on his head. Even with the layers of cloaks and a beard and mane of hair that had grown wild and—gray?—Cody recognized him.

And despite Cody’s own dark tangle of a beard and battered Mando half-armor, his Jedi had recognized _him._ And trusted him on sight.

Which meant Obi-Wan somehow knew.

Whatever Obi-Wan had bought in Anchorhead, he took his time putting away. Cody watched him, a strange emotion itching at his chest. It took him too long to realize it was relief. Pure, exhausting relief, and a release of tension that Cody hadn’t known he’d carried for nine long years.

“I’m sorry.” The words were out of Cody’s mouth before he could think much on them—and the fact that, all those years ago, there had been no _choice_ , not with the trap Palpatine had set.

Obi-Wan—Ben?—turned to him, brows lifted.

“We didn’t have much time to secure a safe exit for you,” Cody went on, unable to stop himself. “We didn’t know when the order—when it might come down.”

“We?” Obi-Wan asked.

Cody took a steadying breath. “I only trusted six of my officers. Rex warned us they were watching, that it was bigger than anything we could imagine.”

Obi-Wan stared at him a moment before his gaze turned unfocused and distant. “Yes,” he said finally. “You were correct in that.”

“Why here, sir?” At Obi-Wan’s arch glance, Cody corrected himself. “Why Tatooine?”

If Obi-Wan minded that he’d only dropped the honorific, he didn’t show it. He settled himself onto a nearby bench and Cody followed suit across from him at a low table. “As you just so noted, Cody, the war was bigger than anything we could imagine.”

“That doesn’t—“

But Obi-Wan held up a staying hand and Cody let it drop. “Now if I may question you, Cody. Why are you sorry?”

Cody clenched and unclenched his fist. “I _did_ issue the order, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan inclined his head. “And at the time I was rather...dismayed. But in the years since, I learned of the immense effort you and your brothers made to cut beneath the Sith and their maneuvers.” Cody knew that familiar half-smile. “I believe the rebellion that will restore the republic began even before its very fall.”

Cody tucked his chin to his chest for a brief moment. His chest ached at once was, at what could never be regained.

A hesitant sort of quiet settled around them; Obi-Wan rose and performed the necessary motions for a basic dinner, and Cody didn’t protest when Obi-Wan placed a earthenware dish in front of him. It had been a while since he’d eaten.

“Will you join us, then?” Cody asked, finally breaking the silence.

“No, Cody." Obi-Wan had sat across from him. The table was narrow enough that their plates touched and knees bumped. When Obi-Wan looked up from his thin soup, bread in one hand, he seemed very close, his eyes far more intense than Cody ever remembered. "My duty is here.”

He said it with such finality that Cody didn’t push further. He had his own duty, after all. And Jedi had been soldiers, too, all those years ago.

Still were, he knew.

“I cannot stay,” Cody said, after the quiet had settled around them again.

“I know.”

Cody took a steadying breath and met Obi-Wan’s frank gaze over the table. “But I wish I could.”

This time, Obi-Wan’s voice was soft. “I know.”

* * *

At Obi-Wan’s suggestion, Cody left in the morning, when the shadows would hide him from any early raiders and he’d reach the main roads at the time transports would be trundling along, providing their own sort of protection in numbers.

Before he left, Cody gripped Obi-Wan’s shoulder. He fought the urge to pull him closer, to feel him as solidly as he could see him. A night of talk, of quiet companionship—it hadn’t been enough.

“Stay safe, Obi-Wan.”

It was Obi-Wan who reached forward and closed the distance, who bent his forehead and pressed it against Cody’s, as if he’d known—and of course he’d known, Cody realized. “I told you before, old friend, that a measure of thanks was in order,” Obi-Wan said. “Thank you. For my life.”

Cody breathed in once, then exhaled.

“Thank you,” he replied, “for _mine._ ” Obi-Wan pulled away, brows lifted in surprise, and Cody refused to stumble over the words. “I would not be a free man if I had not known you.”

Obi-Wan met his gaze and Cody knew he understood what all else he couldn’t say. Not with the network waiting. Not with their hidden war still waging. And Cody saw an echo of the same in those familiar eyes.

He swallowed and stepped away. “Until we meet again, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan’s half-smile was slow, tired, and somehow tender. “In this life or the next." His hand gripped Cody's arm, held tight for only a moment, then released him. "May the Force be with you, Cody.”

Cody nodded once and turned away, to the path he’d set all those years ago, ignoring the ache in his chest. 

Maybe there was hope, after all. Maybe, after  _this_ war...

_In this life or the next._

* * *

 


End file.
